like a riptide dragged her backward toward the station doors.
The next bullet came seconds later, a stream of bloody mist erupting from the back of a freckled-faced woman right in front of her. The woman slumped back, and Alex nearly fell onto the asphalt of East Forty-second Street in an attempt to hold her up. The woman tumbled onto the pavement, blood gushing out right at the bottom of her ribcage, near her spinal column.
The crowd opened up around the fallen woman, giving Alex a refreshing breath of cool air. She saw the entry wound at the woman’s chest and made an instinctive calculation that the bullets were approaching from a high angle.
Sniper.
She looked up at the buildings that surrounded them, but there were too many windows to even count, let alone find a single shooter. She cast her gaze down at the woman, who stared up at the sky in wide-eyed, uncomprehending terror. Alex moved toward her to administer first aid or at least offer her a measure of solace. But the crowd closed in again as people scrambled for cover, and Alex was swept along with it. It was no use trying to get back to her.
Cover, she thought. I need cover. But it was useless—she was now moving with the mass of people around her, whether she wanted to or not, toward the doors to Grand Central Terminal. She was tossed and squeezed and her mind grew foggy with panic. Focus, she told herself. But the crowd heaved, and her knees couldn’t keep up. She stumbled and fell.
She curled up into a ball as feet hit her back, her shins, her head. She heard another surge of screaming, she didn’t know where from. A shoe scraped her ear, and it seared with pain, feeling like it was half torn off. I’m going to get trampled. I’m going to die. She screamed.
“Alex! Alex!” Her name was reaching her as if from a distance. “Alex, get up!” A hand on her shoulder. “Come on!”
Clark Duffy pulled her to her feet, with the help of a beefy man with a scraggly black beard who was holding back the crowd as much as he could to give her space. She staggered to her feet and moved, led by Clark, toward the door. The rest of the way was a blur of movement and shoves until she was panting inside the main concourse, surrounded by marble and under the green-painted ceiling. Around her, families and friends drew close to each other, looking around in alarm. She turned to Clark.
“Thanks,” she said, giving him a hug. “And thank you,” she told the bearded man who had followed them inside. She wrapped her arms around him.
“It’s, uh, no problem,” he said, flustered. “Bud,” he said, awkwardly extending a hand. “Bud Hooper.”
“Alex.”
“Are you okay?” asked Clark.
She touched her ear, half-expecting to find it dangling from a thin strip of skin. It was wet with blood, but otherwise seemed intact. “Yeah, I’m fine.” So far, she said. But now, they were trapped inside Grand Central Terminal. Whatever was going on, she had a feeling it was just beginning.
9:01 a.m.
Lisa Frieze pounded the pavement in her uncomfortable dress flats. She hit redial on her phone for the fourth time as she wove around a yellow cab on Park Avenue. Traffic was at a standstill and angry drivers leaned on their horns. She heard the plastic click of the receiver being picked up off its cradle.
“Chambers.”
“This is Frieze.” She stayed on the street, avoiding the hordes that were plugging up the sidewalks.
“Frieze who?” came the brusque response, then, before she had time to respond, “The rookie. Right. Take it you’ve heard the news.”
“I just caught wind of it on the radio, sir,” she said, reaching the small crowd that had gathered around the Waldorf, drawn by the arrival of the motorcade. She tried to plunge in through the outer layer and failed. “I need to know if there’s something I should be doing. I’ve studied the emergency response procedures, I can—”
“Are you at the hotel yet?”
“I’m right outside.” A woman in a green jogging suit elbowed her, nearly knocking the phone from her hand. Frieze elbowed her back but couldn’t budge the mass of people blocking her way.
“Get me the report I asked for,” he said. “And stay out of everyone’s way. I can’t spare anyone to hold your hand today.”
“Sir, I’ve got experience with forensic—” He hung up before she could finish. Adding to her frustration was the solid wall of bystanders that stood before her.
“FBI!” She yelled out. “Out of my way!”
The crowd parted, finally, and she pushed through to the police cordon. A young man in aviators wearing the black uniform of the NYPD and holding a Styrofoam cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee stepped forward to meet her.
“Special Agent Lisa Frieze,” she said, flashing her badge. “I need to get inside.”
“I can let you through, but the hotel’s locked down,” he said, lifting and pulling the steel barrier one-handed with a grunt, opening a crack just wide enough so she could pass. “No one’s going in or out. There was a bomb, you know. At Penn Station.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“Emergency procedures,” he said and sipped his coffee. “To protect the president of Iran. Although if you ask me, I don’t know why we’re trying to protect the bastard, anyway.”
“I didn’t,” she said.
“Didn’t what?”
“Ask you. I just need to get inside.”
“You can try,” he said, shrugging.
She walked up to one of the glass double doors to the Waldorf lobby and knocked on the glass, holding up her badge. A man in a suit who was standing guard, blond and bony-faced, either Secret Service or Diplomatic Security, mouthed locked down. She raised her badge higher and raised her eyebrows, but he just shook his head.
She turned back and looked up and down Park, running her fingers through her drawn-back hair. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed. No signal.
Great.
“Looks like you and I are late to the party.”
She wheeled about to find the man who’d spoken. He was tall and wiry with a strong chin and nose, in khakis and a blue button-down with rolled up sleeves despite the cold. Handsome, in a sort of professorial way. But he was no professor. The faint scars on the back of his hand pegged him as a man of action. And if he was on this side of the police barriers, he was no mere civilian.
“Peter Conley,” he said, holding up his ID. “State Department.”
“FBI. Agent Frieze. Lisa.” She held out her hand and they shook. “Can you get me inside?”
“No can do,” he said, “Secret Service is running point, and they get territorial.”
She looked back at the hotel and the stolid agent at the door. “Are you the one in charge here at the scene?”
“I’m way down
